Portugal Smart Vineyard: Reducing 15% Water Consumption with SenseCAP LoRaWAN Solution

Quinta do Bouro is a grape growing company in the Western Region of Portugal. Its activity is based on sustainable and environmentally friendly agriculture following a set of good practices, which prove respect for nature and enable the production of grapes with a high standard of quality. The documented history of Quinta do Bouro dates back to the end of the 15th century and has always valued quality and innovation to best serve its clients.

Currently, the company leads a consortium of 12 agricultural companies, farmers’ associations, and national scientific and technological entities, in collaboration with the Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon. Their infrastructures include vineyards, a cellar with a capacity for half a million liters of wine, modern offices, and warehouses for agricultural machinery and implements. More recently, a laboratory entitled “Robotics4Farmes” has been established for the development of innovative agricultural equipment.

Vineyard treatment and grape growth control are the main activities of Quinta do Bouro. Now they are undertaking a multi-year project to use the collected data to improve target domain-specific algorithms (AI/ML) in order to improve agricultural sustainability, resource efficiency, and yield accuracy due to climate and environmental changes.

We are glad that Quinta do Bouro applies SenseCAP industrial wireless IoT products including SenseCAP M1 LoRaWAN Gateway, data logger, and sensors (SenseCAP S2102 Light intensity sensor, SenseCAP S2104 Soil moisture and temperature sensor） in their pilot projects of Machine Learning Algorithms. At present, our devices have been deployed in one of their vineyards in the Quinta do Bouro of Portugal, to collect the following environmental data:

-Light intensity

-Soil moisture and temperature

SenseCAP M1 is compatible with Helium LongFi Network. As a LoRaWAN gateway, it can provide miles of wireless network coverage and data transmission capacity for Long Range /LoRaWAN devices. In this case, M1 provides Helium network coverage for the sensors and sends the data to SenseCAP Cloud.

Benefiting from the SenseCAP Mate App and SenseCAP Portal, the real-time and historical data collected by the sensors can be remotely monitored and managed. It can also be visualized on platforms such as Datacake and Ubidots, etc. In this way, farmers can save a lot of time since they don’t have to visit the vineyard physically to check on the environmental conditions.

Vine growth depends on the surrounding environment. Light intensity, temperature, moisture, among others, are important conditions. By collecting data and improving algorithms, Quinta do Bouro’s Smart Agriculture project continues to enable farmers to make more accurate decisions in response to climate and environmental changes, which will help tackle a range of problems such as water waste and overuse of fertilizer, and produce high-quality grapes and wine. One of the project leaders, Vitor says “During the proof of concept studies, a potential reduction of 15% in the water consumption could be achieved without any reduction in the production.”

Furthermore, the project also contributes to the expansion of LoRaWAN network deployment and IoT applications. “3 different levels of density are being proposed with the impact on the data accuracy. The positive point is the good Helium coverage that we already have on these first target customers” adds Vitor.

_{Diagram of the project}

Quinta do Bouro plans to use both supervised learning and unsupervised learning for the algorithms in 2023. As the algorithm improves, the project is expected to achieve not only the goal of reducing water consumption, but also reducing operating costs and improving the accuracy of production estimates. Let‘s wait and see!